As a long-time homebrewer, when our President, Scott asked me, “wouldn’t it be cool if you and Jim brewed a beer to commemorate our rebrand later this year?” my reaction, after the immediate “heck yeah! Beer is awesome”, was honestly mostly confusion.
“Huh. I didn’t realize Jim brewed beer.”
“Even if we did, how are we going to get the beer to the office?”
“Do the Bears really think they got good value from the Mack trade?”
“Seriously, I live in Oregon, and the office is in Chicago.”
“Is the McRib ever really ‘back’?”
“Heck, Jim lives in Utah”
“Wait… we’re rebranding?”
At this time, the name of our august institution was Open Data Group. I’d joined a little over a year earlier, to help with customer-facing engineering activity in support of our software product (at the time called Fastscore) designed to help companies realize business value out of their data science models. Yes, the name did seem a little outdated – a reference to the company’s origins in data science consulting – but I didn’t realize we had been contemplating a company-wide rebrand.
So, after momentarily recovering from the idea that Ryan Pace honestly appeared to think Trubisky was a franchise quarterback, I spent some more time considering the finer points of the logistics of attempting to ship 10 gallons of fresh homebrew over 2200 miles. Thankfully, I have some the finest minds in mathematics (and Chicago-area trivia) at my disposal: our Data Science team.
Really, though, this was a matter outside their many areas of expertise. So, after considering the various imagined horrors of allowing a third party to be responsible for taking our beer for such a long journey, the answer was obvious: Road Trip!
For those of you who may not have attempted or accomplished a similar feat, the route from Medford, Oregon (AKA: ModelOp PNW), through Park City, Utah (AKA: ModelOp at 7,000 feet) to Chicago, Illinois (AKA: ModelOp HQ) is what seasoned road-trip veterans like to call “a very long way to drive; seriously, just fly already. What are you trying to prove?”
However, I’ve never been the kind of person to back down from a challenge (especially one issued by my own nagging subconscious); and I’m also luckily someone who has family in the Chicago area with whom I could crash for a while. So, the matter decided, my wife and I packed up the faithful steed with a) enough provisions to last us a month, b) an extra 20L of gas, c) one (1) 80 pound dog (see attached), and 48 bottles of freshly-brewed ModelOp Golden Ale (30.5 IBU, 5.7 SRM, 5.0% ABV) for the road ahead.
And the journey starts…stay on the lookout for the next blog!
